GOT MILK? HOPE NOT!

Great Article** I had to repost!

White Poison ColorLines, by Shanti Rangwani, Mar 7, 2002

Got milk? If not, then thank your lucky stars. Because if
you do, medical research shows that you are likely to be
plagued by anemia, migraine, bloating, gas, indigestion,
asthma, prostate cancer, and a host of potentially fatal
allergies--especially if you are a person of color.

Ignoring this, the government declares that milk is
essential to good health, subsidizes the milk industry to
the tune of billions of dollars, and requires milk in its
public school lunch programs. And celebrity shills sporting
milk mustaches tell us that milk is rich in proteins,
calcium, and vitamins--and very cool to boot.

They forget to tell you about the dangers lurking in that
innocuous-looking glass of white. Once criticized only by
naturopaths and vegans, now the health effects of milk are
being decried by many mainstream doctors.

The supposedly hip milk mustache is actually a creamy layer
of mucus, live bacteria, and pus.

Former Chairman of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University,
Frank Oski, M.D. even has a book called Don't Drink Your
Milk which blames every second health problem kids suffer on
hormone-ridden commercial milk. Sixty percent of ear
infections in kids under six years of age are milk-induced,
and milk consumption is the number one cause of iron-
deficiency anemia in infants today according to the American
Association of Pediatrics.

But milk is also a racial issue. Almost 90 percent of
African Americans and most Latinos, Asians, and Southern
Europeans lack the genes necessary to digest lactose, the
primary sugar in milk. The milk industry's response is
classic: they have launched new campaigns arguing that non-
whites can digest milk if they take in small sips during the
day. There is a burgeoning industry worth $450 million a
year churning out products designed to minimize lactose
intolerance.

Lactose intolerance is the most common "food allergy," but
to call it an allergy is to take a white-centric view that
trivializes the fact that most of the world's people are not
biologically designed to digest milk.

Milk does no body good, but for the vast majority of the
world's people--people of color--it is a public health
disaster. No other animal drinks cow's milk, not even calves
once they are weaned. The late Dr. Benjamin Spock, the
U.S.'s leading authority on child care, spoke out against
feeding "cow's glue" to children, saying it can cause
anemia, allergies, and diabetes and in the long term, will
set kids up for obesity and heart disease, the number one
cause of death in this country.

Most of milk's much-vaunted protein is contained in casein--
which is also a raw material for commercial glue.
Undigested, it simply sticks to the intestinal walls and
blocks nutrient absorption.

The mainstream media and the government ignore the medical
studies showing that milk is a serious health threat, in
part because people of color are the main victims. The
institutionalization of racism is highlighted by U.S.
Department of Agriculture spokesperson Eilene Kennedy's
statement on milk, that the government's recommended food
pyramid is intended for "the majority of Americans. It
doesn't communicate to all Americans."

The USDA continues to require that school lunch programs
include milk with every meal, and recommend that we glug
milk for calcium, even though Harvard studies show an
increase in osteoporosis and bone-breakage in people who
consume milk. It says we should drink milk to prevent heart
disease (and is echoed by Larry King) even though saturated
fat constitutes 55 percent of milk solids.

To call lactose intolerance an "allergy" is to take a white-
centric view that trivializes the fact that most of the
world's people are not biologically designed to digest milk.
The dairy lobby perpetrates lies to ensure its profits. It
benefits directly from the exaggerated support prices the
government shells out for this "health food." The government
pays over a billion dollars a year for surplus butter. A
General Accounting Office (GAO) study concluded that a
reduction in the government price support system would have
netted consumers savings of $10.4 billion from 1986 to 2001.
And the USDA pays inflated prices to purchase dairy products
for both the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and federal
school lunch programs--milking the taxpayers and actually
getting them to pay for poisoning 26 million school kids.

The milk lobby has whipsawed its way into the highest
echelons of power. Staffers under Richard Nixon were
indicted for accepting $300,000 from the dairy lobby for
making milk part of the school lunch program.

Dr. Robert Cohen of the Dairy Education Board, a nonprofit
organization dedicated to exposing the milk lobby, contends
that the dramatic 52 percent rise in asthma deaths among
minority kids in New York coincided with the surplus milk,
cheese, and butter pumped into them under the USDA's free
school lunch and breakfast giveaway programs. The incidence
of asthma deaths may be even higher since asthma is not a
reportable disease, and asthma deaths are sometimes
certified as cardiovascular disease.

There is also a direct link between milk consumption and
prostate cancer among African Americans, who have the
highest incidence of this disease in the world. A study in
Cancer has shown that men who reported drinking three or
more glasses of whole milk daily had a higher risk for
prostate cancer than men who reported never drinking whole
milk.

The controversial Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH)--banned in
most countries--is pumped into U.S. milch cows to increase
annual yield (50,000 pounds of milk per cow today compared
to 2,000 pounds in 1959). Milk from cows treated with BGH is
likely to contain pus from their udders since the hormone
leads to mastitis, or udder infection. BGH use results in a
tumor-promoting chemical (IGF-I) that has been implicated in
an explosive increase of cancer of the colon, smooth muscle,
and breast.

The antibiotics dairy farmers use to treat BGH-caused
infections in cows appear in their milk and greatly hasten
human tolerance to most antibiotics, a potentially life-
threatening state of affairs. The Center for Science in the
Public Interest reports that 38 percent of milk samples in
10 cities were contaminated with sulfa drugs and other
antibiotics.

A fightback is beginning. Protesters picketed New York City
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's planned milk promotion campaign
with a photo of the mayor wearing a milk mustache over the
caption, "Got Prostate Cancer?" Giuliani (who, like his
father, has prostate cancer) dropped the campaign. And
doctors from the Physicians Committee for Responsible
Medicine (PCRM) persuaded Washington, D.C. Mayor Anthony
Williams not to declare May 11 as "Drink Chocolate Milk Day"
by presenting evidence that milk is harmful, especially to
people of color.

The PCRM--composed of some of the leading doctors in the
U.S.--has campaigned extensively in the health and consumer
press and led a successful legal effort in 1999 to make
dairy products optional in the federal food guidelines. The
campaign was supported by a number of prominent civil rights
organizations and leaders, including the Congressional Black
Caucus, the NAACP, Martin Luther King, III, Jesse Jackson,
Jr., the National Hispanic Medical Association, and former
Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders.

The dairy lobby remains cozy with most medical practitioners
to perpetrate its "drink milk" propaganda. However, not one
of the 1,500 papers listed in Medicine that deal with milk
points to its goodness--only to the pus, blood, antibiotics,
and carcinogens in milk, and the chronic fatigue, anemia,
asthma, and autoimmune disorders milk consumption causes.

The time has come for the milk industry to face the kind of
scrutiny that the tobacco companies face today. Meanwhile,
discard the moo juice.